Original Press Release

Passware Takes Password Cracking Into the Cloud

Press release date: Mar 23, 2011

Passware Kit Is the First Commercial Software to Utilize Cloud Computing for Accelerated Password Recovery

MOUNTAIN VIEW, Calif. - Passware, Inc., a provider of password recovery, decryption, and electronic evidence discovery software for corporations, law enforcement organizations, government agencies and private investigators, announces its Passware Kit Forensic is the first commercial software to harness the power of cloud computing to accelerate password recovery.

"Some types of encryption are so secure that without expensive hardware accelerators, it becomes literally impossible to recover passwords in reasonable time," said Dmitry Sumin, president of Passware, Inc. "This new feature allows the end user to rent computer time from Amazon for the use of the required hardware. Users now have an option to accelerate the password recovery process without the need to invest into expensive hardware clusters - making powerful password recovery affordable."

Passware Kit allows the use of Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2, aws.amazon.com/ec2/) - a highly scalable cloud computing platform - for accelerated password recovery, without the need to buy expensive hardware. Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud, a web service that provides resizable computing capacity in the cloud, changes the economics of computing by allowing users to pay only for the capacity they actually use and avoids the need for users to overload computer resources.

Passware Kit Forensic can distribute the time-consuming password recovery process among eight Amazon Cluster GPU instances, each of which has two NVIDIA Tesla Fermi GPU cards - one of the most powerful types of graphic cards. A single Amazon Cluster GPU Instance accelerates the MS Office 2010 password recovery speed by 11 times. Using all of the eight Clusters, Passware Kit Forensic is more than 80 times faster and provides a password recovery speed of over 30,000 passwords per second (the actual speed depends significantly on the Internet connection speed).

The first demonstrations of this feature will take place at the EuroForensics International Digital & Medical Forensic Sciences Conference in Istanbul, Turkey, March 24-26 (http://www.euroforensics.com/index.asp). Passware representatives will show the software in action at their booth #U8 in the exhibit hall, and present "Cracking Full Disk Encryption in Minutes with Live Memory Analysis" on March 25th.

Accelerated Password Recovery

Passware Kit Forensic recovers passwords for more than 180 file types and hard disk images. For many file types, it provides instant password recovery or removal, while for some applications, such as MS Office 2010, that feature a strong encryption algorithm, decryption requires brute-force cracking, which is the slowest approach to password recovery.

A video recording of how to use Passware Kit with Amazon step-by-step is available at http://bit.ly/am-vid.

Passware Kit is available now from Passware and a network of resellers worldwide. The manufacturer's suggested price for Forensic edition starts at $795 with one year of free updates. Additional product information and screen shots are available at lostpassword.com/kit-forensic.htm. For Amazon pricing, refer to http://aws.amazon.com/ec2/#pricing

About Passware Inc.

Founded in 1998, Passware Inc. is the worldwide leading maker of password recovery, decryption, and electronic evidence discovery software. Law enforcement and government agencies, institutions, corporations and private investigators, help desk personnel, and thousands of private consumers rely on Passware software products to ensure data availability in the event of lost passwords. Passware customers include many Fortune 100 companies and various US federal and state agencies, such as IRS, US Army, US Department of Defense (DOD), US Department of Justice, US Department of Homeland Security, US Department of Transportation, US Postal Service, US Secret Service, US Senate, and US Supreme Court. More information about Passware, Inc. is available at www.lostpassword.com/.

Passware is a privately held corporation with headquarters in Mountain View, Calif. and a software development and engineering office in Moscow, Russia.